The Holly and the Ivy

Have you ever looked at …

… the holly and the ivy in St Leonard’s?

“The Holly and the Ivy” must be one of the odder Christmas carols.  After the first line, ivy is only mentioned once, in the final verse.  All the rest of the carol is about the symbolism of different parts of the holly, its flower, berry, leaf and bark.  Each one is linked to part of the Christian message.  So it is sung at Christmas, to remind the singers that Jesus was born to be Saviour and Redeemer.

Around St Leonard’s, both holly and ivy grow in profusion.  It is easy to take them both for granted, but this is the time of year to notice their greenery, when many of our other trees and shrubs are bare.  It is partly because these two plants are evergreen that they are so widely used as decorations at Christmas.  Pagans may claim that such decoration is a reminder of the prospect of new life, and this is a message that has been renewed and developed by Christians over the centuries.  So ivy has become a symbol of Christ’s resurrection.

For many people, however, ivy is a weed, a plant that grows where it shouldn’t.  It clings to our trees and walls, or spreads over the soil in places we find hard to reach.  There are plenty of examples of common ivy, the wild plant, throughout the neighbourhood, spilling over walls towards the pavement or road..  On the other hand, for many local gardeners, ivy is a plant to cultivate and encourage.  There are hundreds of varieties to choose from; you can select those which are more effective than common ivy at ground cover, because they form a dense mat which smothers less desirable plants.  Alternatively, it is a useful evergreen to use as a climbing plant, on a trellis, with another plant, or to add colour as it climbs a tree trunk.  Some varieties have been developed as houseplants, and a pyramid of a small-leaf form of ivy is a very attractive room decoration – I have even seen it used as a miniature Christmas tree.  (In Exeter Crematorium, part of the permanent decoration is in the form of silk ivy leaves.)  Or you can choose one with attractive leaves, such as those with variegated colour, yellow edges or yellow centres.  Some have prominent veins on their leaves.  Others are chosen for the colour of their stems – purple being one of the widest available.  And the shape of the leaves differs from variety to variety, with some heart-shaped, and others with pronounced “fingers” to their leaves. 

If you keep your eyes open as you walk around the neighbourhood, you will discover some of these “garden” varieties of ivy.  I’m not going to embarrass the gardeners by pointing you to specific houses to find this wonderful range of our evergreen; instead, I suggest that you find a frond of ivy, pick off one leaf, and then compare it with other leaves as you walk on.  Even in the length of St Leonard’s Road, you will find several different ivies.

In the language of flowers, ivy stands for friendship, fidelity, and marriage; the pre-Raphaelite painters (among others) included ivy as these symbols in their art.  But a wider use of ivy in art dates back to Greek and Roman times when Pan or Bacchus were decorated with garlands of ivy, as were their maiden attendants. 

However, garlands of holly would be somewhat less comfortable to wear.  Like ivy, there are numerous varieties of holly, and the temperate climate of Britain means that we can grow members of the holly family from other parts of the world.  Many ornamental hollies are the result of crosses with a holly from the Canaries.  Despite the prickles on their leaves, holly is used in many hedges around the neighbourhood.  It grows quite slowly, so can be kept under control before those spines do damage to passers-by.  There is a stretch of holly hedge outside the Mardon Centre in Wonford Road, and several houses in St Leonard’s Road have short lengths of holly hedge alongside the pavement.  One curious feature of holly: the plants are dioecious; they require separate male and female plants in order for pollination to occur.  So it is to the advantage of gardeners to have other bushes and hedges nearby.  It is (generally) the female plant that carries the berries.

Like ivy, selective breeding has produced plants with a variety of leaf shapes, sizes and colours.  Some varieties come with both male and female forms, such as “China Boy” and “China Girl”, but growers joke that Golden King is female and Golden Queen is male. 

Besides the hedges of holly, the neighbourhood has several mature holly trees.  There are four very fine ornamental holly trees outside the door of the Coaver Club at County Hall, and another is close to the ceremonial gateway near Parkers Well.  Others can be found if you look up as you walk through our local streets.  Look out for the coloured leaves, and don’t forget that many holly trees have spineless leaves from six or seven feet above the ground, where grazing animals could not reach them.

Silver edges to the leaves of this holly at the Coaver Club

Gold edges to the leaves of this holly at the Coaver Club

And I wonder how many Christmas cards you will receive showing holly, ivy, or both this year.

(Neighbourhood News, November-December 2013)

The (almost) last word

Have you ever noticed?

The title for this, my final article, is a little different.  Instead of asking if you have ever looked at things, I want to bring together a few oddments that didn’t fit into the categories of the set of articles.

Trees:  Although there are many fine trees in St Leonard’s, we should praise the city council for the beautiful line of maples in Denmark Road by the swimming pool.  At the other end of the neighbourhood in Wonford Road there is a monkey puzzle which is hemmed in by other tall trees, and another can be seen across the river near the allotments.  The Veitch nurseries were in Gras Lawn, and they popularised monkey puzzle trees for rich Victorian land-owners (including the avenue at Bicton College). 

Stones:  In the article that I wrote for the last issue (Nov-Dec 2012) I asked about the stones which face the terrace in Barnfield Road and the front walls of the houses.  Thanks to an interested reader, I discovered that they are part of our city’s history, as these stones came from the second Exe Bridge.  This was built in 1778 and was demolished in 1903.  The building firm of Woodmans built the terrace, and bought the stonework when the bridge was taken down to make way for one which was flat enough for trams to use. 

In an earlier article, I wrote about the granite kerbstones and setts at the edge of some roads, as well as the carved markings in some of them.  You can deduce when some of our local roads were developed by looking at the kerbstones.  The newest roads have concrete kerbstones; older ones have narrow stones, and some of the oldest ones have quite wide stone kerbs.  Even when the kerbs have been lifted and relaid, the stonework remains.  In the developments that date from between the wars, there are stone setts in the road opposite the shared drives.  The craftsmen who laid the kerbs took pride in shaping stones into curves at junctions and bends - concrete kerbs are less imaginative.  I have also noticed unusual dropped kerbstones in Spicer Road and Rivermead Road at house entrances which have been cut with grooves to give better traction.  And in the parts of the gutters of Lyndhurst Road and Fairpark Road, there are slates instead of the local granite.

A different kind of stone is to be found on a few street corners.  These are the conical stones built into the corner of a wall to protest that corner from cartwheels.  If a wheel came too close, the hard, shaped stone would force it away from the wall.  Look for one in Radnor Place.

House and other walls:  the terrace of houses at the southern end of Marlborough Road was originally called Queen’s Terrace.  There is a space on the wall where the name-plate used to be.  In Barnfield Road there is a house with a Jack in the Green; there are roses on the east side of the Lord Mamhead flats – just visible from the gateway.  And, don’t forget the demon which broods over the bottom of Holloway Street, the imposing number 3 on the wall over the toilets on the Quay and the date 1878 on the wall of the Antiques Centre on the Quay

There’s a lion in Manston Terrace (in a garden not on a wall) and a fan-tailed pigeon on a gatepost in West Grove Road, and a gate with spider and web in Baring Crescent.  Someone asked about the rabbit between the eagles on two houses in Wonford Road.  It turns out to be a recent addition, as it does not appear in the photograph in the Civic Society’s book about St Leonard’s.  There are two similar eagles on a pair of houses in Salutary Mount, Heavitree

Inscriptions Have you noticed that there are the names of the maker on some lamp-posts.  There are several which have the inscription “ …. Engineers, Exeter”

And in this month of the RSPB’s Great Garden Birdwatch: have you looked at …our fellow inhabitants?

I was glad when “Home Information Packs” ceased to be required by sellers of houses.  Not, I hasten to say, for political reasons, and only partially for financial reasons, but because the packs didn’t describe a home.  They were about the dwelling, the house, the flat, and not about the home. 

Now, suppose you were creating a real information pack about your home.  It could make an interesting story, as you interwove the story of your life and your family’s adventures with the way that it was affected by the place where you live.  What stories would you tell? 

A Home Information Pack really should mention the creatures that share our neighbourhood.  What would you include for your home? 

During last summer, I read the remarkable book, “Wildlife of a Garden” by Jennifer Owen.  For thirty years, she monitored the birds, animals, insects etc that shared her garden in Leicester.  The list went on and on.  She was a biologist, and had access to specialists who could identify what she found and collected.  The book reveals the range of creatures who share a suburban garden, many of which are easily overlooked. 

So instead of telling you what you might see, why not investigate for yourself, looking at birds, butterflies, moths, animals and insects.  The results will surprise you!

A second book from my recent reading list would make a good present for anyone interested in wildlife.  Stephen Moss’ “Wild Hares and Hummingbirds” is a diary of a year looking at the wildlife of a village in Somerset, seen through the eyes of one  of the BBC’s Springwatch producers

Thank you

Thank you to the many people who have commented on these articles.  I have included some of your comments in my pieces.  However, I refused to write one article.  Someone asked me to write “Have you ever looked at … eyesores in the neighbourhood?”

Meanwhile, I hope that some of the readers of the Neighbourhood News are going to look at their surroundings with fresh eyes.  (And perhaps, when you are visiting other parts of the city, or going further afield.)  Please let me know of anything in the future that you see which catches your interest.

In the St Leonard's Neighbourhood News for January-February 2013

postscript: As many readers will know, I returned from exile to write further columns for the Neighbourhood News.  These can be found in the blog.

Have you ever looked at … Horse Chestnut trees in St Leonard’s?

There are several horse chestnut trees around St Leonard’s, with a few fine specimens overhanging Matford Lane from the grounds of County Hall.  They are trees which make their presence felt at this time of year, when the conkers start falling, and children start collecting them to play with.  (Despite rumours, it is not necessary to wear goggles for games of conkers!) 

 

We are also aware of horse chestnut trees in the spring, when their “Roman candle” flowers make a splash of colour. 

Something odd has happened to our horse chestnut trees in the last ten years.  The leaves are turning brown earlier in the autumn, and the fallen leaves are shrivelled.  The trees are being attacked by a moth, the horse chestnut leaf miner (Cameraria ohridella).  Its tiny caterpillar (a little smaller than a grain of rice) is responsible for the damage.  The first reports of this moth in the UK were on Wimbledon Common in 2002, and after that, the infestation spread very rapidly.  It was unknown in Devon until 2005 or 2006, but by last year, it had spread all over the county.  Some of the spread has been natural, as the moths multiply and fly, aided by the wind.  It is thought that some of the caterpillars hitched rides on dead leaves carried by cars, lorries and trains!   Certainly, the early reports of damage included several towns that were well away from other sites with infestation.

It looks as if we will have to live with the moth, its caterpillars and larvae.  The trees do not suffer, except for their visual appearance.  The species has no known predators or inexpensive way of control, despite intensive study in Britain and across Europe.  The moth first came to the notice of biologists in the 1970s and 1980s, and was named as a species in 1986.  In the past year, there has been reported success as a side effect of some experiments treating horse-chestnut trees for a bacterial disease.  There are some natural predators, but they haven’t been so successful in hitching lifts across Europe.  The best advice that can be offered to reduce the effect of the caterpillar and moth without this experimental method is to remove all the dead leaves and burn them, or compost them in a hot compost bed.  This reduces the number of moths that emerge in the early spring.  However, the gap is quickly filled by moths spreading in from surrounding areas.  In September last year, the trees in Matford Lane were badly affected, possibly because there were leaves underneath them all the previous winter.  A few trees in Countess Wear, where the dead leaves had been swept away, had not been so badly damaged.

Biologists at the University of Hull are studying the leaf miner and some of those natural predators.  If you want to find out more, look for “Conker Tree Science” on the internet.

Meanwhile, this autumn, look at the horse chestnut trees around us, and reflect on the way that a moth and its tiny caterpillar can affect something so large as a tall tree, and spread across our country so rapidly.  (September - October 2012)

Have you looked at some more “Little things” in St Leonard's

In an earlier article I wrote about "little things", did you look at the “little things” in St Leonard’s mentioned there? This is a sequel

In that article, I mentioned the signs for fire hydrants with the large “H” and numbers above and below. Around the neighbourhood you can find examples which are cast metal, plastic, and self-adhesive. The figures above the H are the nominal pipe diameter (mm or inch), and below the H is the distance to the hydrant (m). (Did you know that the fire brigade employs a fire hydrant inspector, who drives around in a van with his job title painted on the sides?). There used to be a carved sign for a hydrant in St Leonard’s Road dating from before the plates were introduced in the 1890s, but it seems to have disappeared. However, you can still find a carved inscription reading 2ft 6in on a kerbstone in Radford Road (close to The Quadrant) which I assume once indicated a hydrant of some kind. Whatever it was, it is not there now, or the kerbstone has been moved; does anyone know?
Your local postbox is another little thing which it is easy to overlook, because it is such an everyday item. Look a little closer, and you will see that there are numerous designs, so many that there are people who make a hobby of spotting them and recording their details. Most of the postboxes in St Leonard’s are inset into walls. The first feature to look for is the crest which tells you who was reigning when the box was made. There used to be a Victorian box in Roberts Road, though the current one is from our present queen’s reign. (St David’s still has an original Victorian box inset into a wall, and there is a pillar box of the same era in Pinhoe Road.) Most of the boxes around St Leonard’s are inscribed for Elizabeth II. Edward VII is represented in Victoria Park Road, George V in several places, including one in Colleton Crescent which has a modern storage box fastened to the side. There is one for George VI in Wonford Road. The boxes for George V only read GR. There is a mystery about why a box was placed in Colleton Hill (it is closed now) when there is an older one round the corner. The only reign missing is Edward VIII; it lasted such a short time in 1936, that there are very few boxes from that year in the U.K., and only one – as far as the records online go – in Devon. It’s in Peryam Crescent, St Loyes.

There are other features to look for on postboxes. Some have the maker’s name, and more recently, all have been given a serial number. The name of the manufacturer may be hard to read on older boxes, because of the build-up of paint over the years.

If you are coming into the area along Wonford Road, you may notice the old coach house alongside the road between Matford Avenue and Matford Road. It has a loft door overlooking the carriageway. Beside it is a rare survival of a road edge reflector post, left over from long before the change to international road signs. It is of the design introduced in the 1930s.

I am sure that there is scope for collecting examples of crests and badges around Exeter. There are several on the quayside, including those on the lamp standards which came from the old Exe bridge. Look around the city to find the many times that the three towers of Exeter’s heraldic crest have been reproduced on buildings!

After I wrote about autumn trees in the last issue, one of the readers expressed her regret at the trees that have been lost in St Leonard’s over the last generation. She said, sadly, that many of the replacements have been unimaginative, a limited range of species. So, a plea on behalf of her and others who are dismayed at the loss of variety in trees – please think about what you are planting. Don’t just think of acers and maples, cypresses, birches and London planes. You are planting a gift for the future, so avoid fast-growing rubbish. Try something reasonably stately; you won’t see it in its splendour, but at the end of the century, someone will thank you. When I wrote the article, it was some time in advance of the magnificent display of colour that we experienced in October and November 2010.

 The wallbox at the corner of Victoria Park Road and Wonford Road, 

dating from the reign of Edward VII

Have you ever looked at the autumn trees in St Leonard’s?

In the spring, I suggested looking at one type of tree in St Leonard’s, the wide range of magnolias that are grown here. Now is the time to wander around the neighbourhood to admire the trees again, hopefully while there are still a few leaves on the deciduous ones.

A walk at this time of year will reveal many trees whose colours match those of the fall in New England (though not the forests found there) at a fraction of the price of an air fare across the Atlantic. We have some splendid mature trees, some a century or more old. Wherever you go in St Leonard’s, there are mature oaks, maples, beeches and birches whose leaves turn to shades of brown, yellow, gold and red.

One place to wander on a tree-hunting expedition is County Hall. Quite a few of the trees in the grounds there are evergreen. Outside the main entrance is one of the original “Exeter oaks”, properly called “Lucombe oaks”. William Lucombe was a gardener from St Thomas in the middle of the 18th century and he produced this hybrid which became very popular among wealthy landowners, partly because of his sales expertise. The oaks grew quickly, were evergreen and had a good shape. A few years ago, there was concern that this 250 year old tree might be suffering from a fungal disease, and as a precaution, the tree has been grafted to provide a successor. Outside the Coaver Club, there are some evergreen holm oaks; children play under these in the summer while their parents watch cricket. There is an evergreen Monterey pine by the main entrance. There’s colour to be seen in the beech hedge by Matford Avenue, and in the line of maples at the Matford Lane entrance. The fine horse chestnut trees around Parker’s Well generally also provide some colour at this time of year, although the weather during the summer may mean that the best of the colour is over by the time you read this.

Autumn colour at County Hall, November 2012

There’s more colour to be found in Belle Isle Park. You can make a circular walk by following the riverside path through the park, and returning by the foot and cycle path that runs just outside the fence on the other side. In the park you can enjoy the variety of trees that surround the grassed areas, and by the river bank. By the path, you are at the level of the higher branches of some of the trees, and able to look at the berries growing there.

If you venture along the riverside from Belle Isle towards Exeter Quay, you will pass the grounds of Larkbeare, where there are some fine mature trees. However the best view of these is from across the river.

Depending on the weather and where you walk, you may be able to delight in scuffing through drifts of leaves. It stimulates our senses: there’s the sight of the drifting leaves, the sound of feet crushing them, the feel of heaps of leaves on your feet, and possibly the smell of damp autumn soil and leaves. Is that why adults and children find this such a pleasant activity?

But for a shorter stroll, why not walk round the block from the village? In the last issue, I suggested this walk looking at the gables of houses. Go along Denmark Road, and turn right into Barnfield Hill. Before you walk very far, look back and admire the maple in a garden in Barnfield Road. At the top of the road, turn right into Spicer Road and return. On the way, enjoy the mature trees in the grounds of the almshouses, and those that surround the Maynard School. There are numerous long-established trees, both evergreen and deciduous. Depending on when you walk, there may be trees which have shed all their leaves, revealing the shape of their branches.

Even if you go no further than the village, stop by the cycle racks and look across the road at the trees framed by the shops either side of the car dealer’s.

So enjoy the colour, the trees, and an autumn walk – and ponder the question: why don’t all the leaves fall off at the same time?

The picture below shows autumn colour in Belle Isle Park on November 10th 2011